Where to travel in 2018: tropical islands no-one has heard of

Follow the author of this article

If there is cachet in visiting islands no one much has heard of, let alone visited, then 2018 promises to be quite a year for point scoring: Principe, Unguja, Havelock, the Koh Rong archipelago… all of them will soon have top-tier hotels.

With a population of barely 6,000 and an area of not much more than 50 square miles, most of cloaked in luxuriant rainforest, hence its designation as a Unesco biosphere reserve, Principe lies in the Gulf of Guinea, about 100 miles off the west coast of Africa, 87 miles northeast of São Tome, together with which it constitutes the second smallest of Africa’s 54 nations. (The smallest, for the record, is Seychelles, where incidentally the private island of Desroches...